How we know that Rick Perry's ascension to the presidency has already been decided

We knew that the media were already in love with Rick Perry. Even though we've already had a theocratic moron from Texas with a full head of hair and a glad-handing manner and cowboy boots in the White House, one who took control of a country with a surplus from eight years of peace and prosperity and wrecked it with tax cuts and wars that go nowhere, the men of the media loves them some good hair and cowboy boots. And it wouldn't matter if Barack Obama were somehow able to get unemployment down to 4% in the next fourteen months, these guys want them some cowboy and they're going to get it.



Bear witness:

Let's repeat David Gregory about four minutes in, shall we?

You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European

And there you have what passes for punditry: Talking about the possibility of secession is EXACTLY THE SAME as thinking that people who are poor should have the same right to health care as the rich do.



Coming next: Rick Perry's saying that there's nothing we can do to fix things other than to just pray to Jesus is the very definition of strong leadership.



There's nothing to do with David Gregory except throw our hands up in the sky, say "Hasa diga eebowai", and link to some Driftglass Photochoppin' here and here.

Sperm does not carry the ability to do journalism

It does, however, seem to carry the self-satisfied, smug, I-Got-This-Job-Because-My-Dad-Was-Revered-At-NBC gene:



(via)

It's a Sarah Palin world, we just are allowed to live in it...for now

And so it begins again, the media love affair with Sarah Palin. If you watched the news at all yesterday, you know that it was all Sarah Palin, all the time. Every news broadcast was turned into the Sarah Palin show. This morning it's the same thing -- the only story that the news broadcasts think is important is whether this aging prom queen is going to run for the presidency.

Has it ever occurred to these people that this love affair may just put this incurious, mean-spirited, idiotic sociopath into the White House?

You'd think that they'd have wised up by now, what with the 2008 debacle and the relentless self-promotion that she's done since. But no, all Sarah Palin has to do is put on yet more drag (this time a motorcycle helmet) and they're all ejaculating in their pinstripes. (And didn't we have enough from 2000-2008 of a moronic so-called "president" who liked to dress up in costumes?)

I realize that Tim Pawlenty is colorless. I realize that Mitt Romney is plastic. I realize that all the other would-be Republican nominees are batshit crazy (as if Palin is not?). But at what point does the giant maw of cable television news have to do something like actually INFORM, instead of just providing a platform for this blatant self-promoter?

Yesterday was Memorial Day. We still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, though for what end is now a mystery. Thousands of families spent the day yesterday remembering their loved ones instead of grilling burgers, developing melanoma at the beach, or shopping at the mall. You'd think the media would pay attention to some of them. But no, all Sarah Palin has to do is flash her lovely capped teeth, and the media are right there bearing the Greatest Gift of All -- endless, nonstop attention.

Perhaps traditional book publishing shouldn't be regarded as the holy grail for writers anymore

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of our good friend jurassicpork's travels through the publishing industry, and of finding doors slammed in his face.

Most of those of us who write have the dream of someday holding the first bound copy of our first book in our hands. When we hear of others achieving that goal, it's hard not to feel at least a twinge of envy. My supervisor at my last job achieved a publishing deal for his memoir about his garden -- a real, honest-to-goodness book deal, with an agent and a contract and a tour and frontage at Barnes and Noble and a review in the Sunday New York Times book review section. His publisher also picked up the option on his second book as well. If you think I didn't do at least a little bit of teeth-gnashing about it, you're attributing a level of sainthood to me that I lack, for all that my Unfinished Novel In Which I Throw Everything But the Kitchen Sink at my protagonist will probably always be unfinished. The closest thing I'll ever get to a published book is when I compile what used to have a working title of The Drapes are Winning: The Best of Brilliant at Breakfast until I found that Oscar Wilde never said that. And so it goes.

There are those who have done reasonably well with self-publishing. My sister's book, Visioncrafting: A Self-Guided Journey, can be purchased on Amazon.com, just as Donald Rumsfeld's can. We mere mortals can probably sell as many books self-promoting as we're likely to get being buried in the racks at Barnes and Noble. And with Borders going out of business, the idea of Seeing Your Book In The Store doesn't have the same thrill it used to, since Barnes and Noble is going to give most of its prime space to celebrity authors.

The other nasty aspect of book publishing these days, and about one's odds of appearing on the New York Times Bestseller list, is bulk sales. Conservative book clubs often buy tens of thousands of copies of books by right-wing authors. Mitt Romney has exchanged bulk sales for speeches. Right-wing groups bought George W. Bush's memoir in bulk. This makes it next to impossible for nonfiction authors who aren't celebrities to ever make it onto that list. For fiction writers it's worse. For every Jodi Picoult, who cranked out a book every nine months for years before becoming a reliable bestseller, or Fup, a book picked off the slush pile with much fanfare by Morgan Entrekin in 1983 (and which subsequently bombed), there are tens of thousands of people who will never, ever get that first break.

But perhaps it's time to stop revering the publishing industry as the ultimate seal of approval. Celebrity book publishing has always been the cash cow of the industry. When I worked at Simon & Schuster in the 1980's, books like the Jane Fonda Workout Book and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Pumping Iron and the novels of Judith Krantz paid the bills so that Erwin Glikes could publish his neocons.

But now all you need do is be a marginal celebrity and you can be a published author, because name recognition is everything. This is how people like Kim Kardashian and Snooki and that woman who's on one of the Real Housewives show get book contracts.

Or for that matter, the barely 20-year-old Bristol Palin:

The daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has signed with William Morrow to publish "Not Afraid of Life," to come out this summer. Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced Tuesday that the memoir would provide "an inside look at her life."

"Bristol gives readers an intimate behind-the-scenes look at her life for the first time, from growing up in Alaska to coming of age amid the media and political frenzy surrounding her mother's political rise; from becoming a single mother while still a teenager to coping as her relationship with her baby's father crumbled publicly — not once, but twice," according to Morrow.

A listing for the book briefly appeared last month on Amazon.com and on an online HarperCollins spreadsheet. HarperCollins has published two best-sellers by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008: "Going Rogue" and "America by Heart."

Bristol Palin, 20, has become a celebrity in her own right, through her broken relationship with her child's father, Levi Johnston, and through her time as a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars."

"Bristol talks about the highs and lows of her appearance on ABC-TV's 'Dancing With the Stars,' including the aching hours of practice, the biting criticisms, and the thrill of getting to the show's finals," Morrow announced. "She speaks candidly of her aspirations for the future and the deep religious faith that gives her strength and inspiration.

"Plainspoken and disarmingly down to earth, Bristol offers new insight and understanding of who she is and what she values most."

It's a fait accompli that this tome will end up on the New York Times bestseller list, because conservative groups will make sure it does.

So if this is the company that book publishers are keeping, perhaps it's time for aspiring authors to stop casting pearls before swine?

Wednesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: John Cole, for pointing out just How It All Works.

Money quote:

This is about power and control, and this is about driving traffic to their respective website/network. They want to make the WH squirm and if they get really lucky over-react, and what better way to do it than pointless allegations of sexism? They’re just asking questions that matter, you see. “Some say it’s an all boys club,” or “Some say this looks bad” or “some say you have a problem with women.” And then what they want is for Obama to stage an all women’s game or a mixed game for the cameras, and they can say “See, there was a problem, and our focus on this issue corrected it!” Who says investigative journalism is dead! And they will pretend they have accomplished something, while ignoring the Republicans blocking everything on health care and the robber barons on Wall Street continue to rape main street and the taxpayers and so on.

Closing the barn door after the horse leaves

I wonder, now that the very same mainstream media figures who were only too happy to go waist deep in the Big Muddy of Clinton Madness in the 1990's are once again willing to buy right-wing memes, how far they're willing to go...especially now that already there is a group trying to get Barack Obama impeached.

Giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase "media circus"

Via All Spin Zone comes the news that a CNBC e-mail, leaked to TPM Muckraker, exhorts teabaggers to kick up some ruckus at Congressional town hall meetings:

CNBC approached Tea Party activists, looking for angry protest events that would make good television, according to a leaked email from a Tea Party discussion group. And one Tea Bagger responded by flagging an upcoming event that, he said, "should be a riot ... literally."

Yesterday, Tea Party Patriots national coordinator Jenny Beth Martin sent an email, obtained by TPMmuckraker, to a Tea Party google group. Martin told the group: "We have a media request for an event this week that will have lots of energy and lots of anger. This is for CNBC."

She then asked: "So, where are the big events this week and where can TPP best be represented on the news?"

Later that day, a Tea Bagger named Pat Wayman responded with a suggestion, also obtained by TPMmuckraker: "This one should be a riot! literally...." he wrote.

Wayman then posted information for an upcoming "health fair" hosted by Rep. David Scott (D-GA), at which the uninsured will receive free medical coverage*.

As Wayman noted, "[t]his is the Congressman who got a swastika painted on his office sign last night."

Wayman also included a link to a far-right website which lists the Scott event.

You can see both the Martin and Wayman emails here.

So, at least in Martin's telling, the pro-business CNBC was specifically looking for an event with "lots of energy and lots of anger." (Earlier this year, they just relied on their own correspondents for that.)

And of course, some Tea Baggers were only too happy to try to provide that anger.

Late Update: Martin tells TPMmuckraker that she did not forward the Scott event -- or, in fact, any event -- on to CNBC as a candidate for coverage. She stressed that her group "does not endorse anything that incites violence of any kind," adding that the email list is un-moderated. "I can't moderate every single comment," she said.

Asked whether CNBC had specifically told her they were looking for an event with "lots of energy and lots of anger," Martin replied: "That was the impression that I received from them." She declined to elaborate.

CNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I'm sure CNBC didn't. But given the amount of air time given to idiots ranting about "death panels", it's clear that for the 24 x 7 news cycle, this kind of theatre, no matter how insane it is, makes for Good Television™, just as Orly Taitz made for Good Television™ before she had her now-infamous meltdown on MSNBC. It's rare that we see something like what we saw from Lawrence O'Donnell last night, in which a television talking head actually confronts one of these GOP talking point-spouting morons to explain what "taking back the country" means, or what the Founding Fathers' intent was. Why ask these people to back up what they say, when it's so dramatic to just show a white guy tearing up a photo of Rosa Parks at a town hall meeting without bothering to even mention that isn't it odd that it's a photo of a BLACK woman that made this white guy so angry, and gee whiz, the president is black, and maybe there's some kind of race animus going on?

The raw emotion, the sheer batshit crazy abject TERROR of these people, much of it based on nothing but the verbal probes being poked into their reptilian brains by an insurance industry bound and determined to let NO ONE stand in the way of them collecting premiums and then dropping people after they dare to get sick, may make for good television. But is it responsible journalism to show this kind of video, to let Sarah Palin rant on television about nonexistent death panels, and let it all go uncommented as though this kind of delusional nonsense were just "alternative facts" instead of delusional crazy? And how will they cover it when someone actually gets hurt -- or worse? Will that be bread and circuses too?

David Gregory is a Whore

Get the feeling I'm a bit angry these days? Sounding a bit like my blogbuddy jurassicpork, whose bandwidth-devouring post I'm going to leave up because it's worth the download time? Well, why the hell shouldn't I?

Mr. Brilliant and I were talking this evening over burgers and uncharacteristically crappy "chopped and formed" onion rings at The Mountain House this evening (being too lazy, tired, and spent from overwork to grill anything at home) about how Walter Cronkite wasn't an investigative journalist but still managed to almost singlehandedly turn America around on Vietnam; about how Rachel Maddow is rapidly becoming an investigative journalist; about why the incredibly charismatic and schticky Greg Palast can't get work in this country; and why newspapers have only themselves to blame (*cough* Judith Miller *cough*) for their own downfall. Then after working a few more hours, I checked what's going on and found this:

There's a bevy of information in there, but one exchange that jumped out at us was the one between Sanford's press secretary, Joel Sawyer (who just today announced he's quitting -- good for him!) and David Gregory, the host of NBC's Meet the Press. In courting Sanford's office, Gregory wrote that "coming on Meet The Press allows you to frame the conversation as you really want to."

All the networks aggressively wooed Sanford's office in the period during and just after his disappearance, in an effort to convince that their show offered the perfect forum for him to address the controversy. CNN's John King told Sawyer he had always appreciated Sanford's "kindness, candor, and hospitality," and added, in a transparent attempt to bond, "I'm all for anonymous escapes myself." George Stephanopoulos offered his show, ABC's This Week, as a "civil forum to address this week's events." And producers for CBS's Face the Nation, ABC's Good Morning America, several Fox shows, and many others gave Sanford's office the hard sell too.

But the emails of Gregory -- who in the past has been known as a pretty aggressive questioner -- make particularly clear just what a get Sanford was seen as, and how far the networks were willing to go in promising a safe landing place for the governor.

Think about it: Barack Obama has been President for all of six months, and the hacks of television news are already sucking up to the guy they figured would be the next one -- a hypocritical asshole who thinks with his dick, who has absolutely no moral core, and who thinks nothing of letting poor students rot in subpar schools while he spends thousands of dollars of state taxpayer money to fly his dick down to Argentina for a little in-out in-out.

This is the guy for whom David Gregory, who I'm sure had much to say about how Walter Cronkite inspired him, was willing to pimp out Meet the Press. Not that Russert was any less of a fellater of Republicans; after all, he knew damn well that it was Dick Cheney who outed Valerie Plame. But if Gregory's dance with Karl Rove a few years ago didn't tell you who he'll lay down for, his making a nice cushy bed for Mark Sanford on Sunday mornings ought to.

David Gregory, you aren't fit to shine Walter Cronkite's funeral shoes.

Polarizing.

Every now and then I dip my toes for a few minutes into the fetid waters of Morning Joe, just to see what Former Congressman Dead Girl In Office has his knickers in a twist about that day. Yesterday he, like the other GOP shills in cable news, was all up in arms about Joe Biden daring to defend the current administration against the attacks of Dick Cheney -- conveniently forgetting that it is simply Bad Form for a former President or Vice President to criticize the current one -- at least for a while. Even George W. Bush, not a man with whom one ordinarily associates the word "decency", had the decency to not take the bait when asked. But Dick Cheney lives in his own little underworld, where he is both king and deity and is subject to no man's laws, nor anyone's idea of being a civilized human being.

But in the world of Joe Scarborough, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are supposed to be like that nice man John Kerry, who "took the high road" when people like -- yes, you guessed -- Joe Scarborough -- were pummelling him into a loss in 2004. In Scar's world, the natural order of things is for Republicans to attack and Democrats to be good little boys and girls and give them their lunch money.

Yesterday Former Congressman Dead Girl In Office decided that the fact that wingnuts are frothing at the mouth about an Obama gun ban that the President has never even mentioned, let alone advocated and about socialist re-education camps that the President has never even mentioned, let alone advocated, and about FEMA internment camps that were built by KBR at the behest of George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, combined with a Pew Research poll showing a huge split in support between wingnuts and, say, the rest of the country, means that Obama is the most polarizing president in history -- and implying that this is somehow Obama's fault.

Watch it:

I'd like to hear Scarborough explain why, when it was George W. Bush who contracted with FEMA for camps, and swept up everyone's telephone conversations and internet activity into that room in San Francisco, and put nuns and Quakers on no-fly lists for advocacy against the Iraq War, and had Secret Service visiting college kids who had posters critical of him in their dorm rooms, the black helicopter crowd didn't care, but let a Democrat -- a BLACK Democrat, no less -- get elected, and all of a sudden we are headed towards a socialist communist fascist homosexual feminazi welfare state where only Negroes (sic) will be allowed to have guns.

Scarborough isn't out there like Glenn Back advocating that someone take a shot at the President. No, Glenn Beck isn't either -- at least not in so many words. But it's clear that "We surround them" doesn't mean a Maypole dance.

Time to cancel your Newsweek subscription

Here's why.

With threats against Barack Obama's life already rising as a result of Sarah Palin whipping her frothing minions into a frenzy, why on earth would a major publication print something like this?

My subscription runs until August 2014, and I just sent a letter cancelling it.

The Thing That Wouldn't Leave

12...11....10....9....8....7....

So will the press end their love affair with John McCain now that his "soulmate" is off-limits?

The media's shameless sucking up to John McCain has largely been due to the kind of backslapping familiarity he's allowed them over the years. Now he's putting Sarah Palin into the campaign equivalent of a high tower with a moat full of crocodiles around it -- off limits to anyone who might dare catch her in one of her many outright lies speak to her:

More than 40 million people tuned in last week to listen to the speech from Palin, the 44-year-old, first-term governor whom McCain announced as his surprise vice presidential pick just days before. Since then, that basic script is all anyone has heard from her publicly, and her only interaction with the media was a brief conversation with a small group of reporters on her plane Monday _ off the record at her handlers' insistence.

Associated Press reporters were not on the plane, but an aide told the journalists on board that all Palin flights would be off the record unless the media were told otherwise. At least one reporter objected. Two people on the flight said the Palins greeted the media and they chatted about who had been to Alaska, but little else was said.

Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell were just discussing how the McCain camapaign gets away with having Palin lie over and over and over again, and O'Donnell talked about Palin's "popularity." It seems to me that Barack Obama was, until this shiny new object was dangled before the media, also "popular" and yet the media were all too willing to give credence to the notion that he was some kind of secret Islamic terrorist. So why the media should cower from calling Palin the liar that she is just because the wingnuts think she's some kind of small-government reformer when her record actually shows that she'll grab all the Federal cash she can; that she's some kind of "maverick" when she's actually a Dominionist theocrat; that she's just like your average soccer mom; and for the wingnut men, that somehow they'll have the opportunity to have sex with her, is a mystery.

It will be interesting to see whether the media respond to the placement of Palin as off-limits to them, the positioning of her as beyond questioning, the way they would if her name were, say, "Hillary Clinton."

Given who owns the media companies, I'm not putting my money on yes. For I am no fool.

Joe Scarborough Rubber Room watch: The Day After

This morning I'm going to spend some time watching "Morning Joe" to see how The Scar manages to spin last night as good for John McCain.

Perhaps our first indication came at 6:03, when the news crawl under the clip from Obama's speech was about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

6:09 - Scar refers to Joe Biden as "a real guy", then catches himself and says "Well, Obama's a real guy too...", but his heart isn't in it. And his point has been made.

6:14 - discussion of how the economy grew by 3.3%. Scar says it's because "Wal-Mart and other stores were doing better." David Shuster, looking as if he's been relegated to being the guy who scopes out locations for "Dirtiest Jobs" on the Discovery Channel, reminds him wryly that a weak dollar makes our exports cheaper and more attractive.

6:32 - Logrolling in our time. Scar quotes WaPo's Eugene Robinson, who is also a ubiquitous presence on MSNBC:

All Americans, regardless of race or party, should think of John Lewis bleeding on that Alabama bridge -- and then think of him at Invesco Field, watching a black man accept his party's nomination. Tears are entirely appropriate.

6:33 - Hide the children. Peggy Noonan is coming. And Mika quotes from her Column of Unusual Vapidity:

I think he was saying, I'm a surprising person, but I can be president. I'm attractive, but I have depth. And by the way, the past eight years? I will be so much better than that. Take a chance. Not a gamble, a chance.

Will it work? We'll see the polls on the final convention bounce soon. We'll know some of the answer then. But I have a feeling this speech will be like the Europe trip. It will take time for people to let it sink in, and decide what they think. And I'll tell you, Mr. Obama left a lot of space for Mr. McCain to play the happy warrior next week. He left the Republicans a big opportunity to wield against him, in contrast, humor, and wit, and even something approximating joy.

Mika didn't quote that last paragraph, and I don't blame her one bit. I mean, after all, think about who's likely to speak at the Republican National Convention next week. Think about John McCain and his rendition of the Bush Beavis Giggle. Somehow "joy" isn't the word one would associate with this bunch.

7:03 - Buchanan calls last night's acceptance speech "a manly speech." This is followed by the Obligatory Obama is a Wuss remarks. I guess we ought to let these guys enjoy it while they can.

7:07 - Joe Scarborough decides that using the metaphor of "lining the bullets up" and then "firing the gun at John McCain", used in the context of a black nominee, is a good idea. Buchanan, who decries the demise of "White America", is still in manlove, says "More Rambo, less Alan Alda." Scar says "Americans love millionaires."

7:09 - They run John McCain's congratulatory ad. Funny how they don't mention the one that even a Fox affiliate questioned, that contains a frame of Obama speaking in front of a crowd with people holding up letters reading C H A N G E -- except the "C" is darkened out of existence, and the "E" is out of the frame.

7:24 - Mika opines that early reports on the speech had said it wouldn't go on the attack, and wondered if there was a last minute change. Obviously Mika has never heard of the head fake.

7:26 - Chuck Todd, who is usually more sane than this, remarks that chants of "USA!" are unheard of among Democrats. And worse, he says that this is a gesture of patriotism.

7:27 - Joey Scar makes the obligatory "San Francisco Liberals" reference, implying "gays aren't patriotic." Then he refers to "Jews and everybody else." Everyone, presumably, except Muslims.

7:43 - It seems McCain's running mate is not going to be Tim Pawlenty. Scarborough apparently didn't listen to the Clintons' speeches, because he puts out the name of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. He belittles the notion that a 72-year-old man with cognitive difficulties and three bouts of melanoma needs a running mate who's ready to be preisdent. Scarborough's love of John McCain is so deep he thinks McCain is immortal. Buchanan makes me laugh by saying Mitt Romney is up to the task of debating Joe Biden.

I'll tell you this much: Next Tuesday, when I wake up and don't have a job, I have plenty to do. But I'll tell you one thing I won't be doing -- sitting in front of the TeeVee watching this bunch of nimrods.

How John McCain Bought the Press for the Price of a Few Racks o'Ribs

Caught on tape:

(h/t)

It isn't all the Obama campaign's fault

I've been hard on Barack Obama and his campaign lately, for their continuation of the long Democratic tradition of taking the Republican sucker-punches and not punching back. In the last few days, Obama has shown some signs of realizing that "taking the high road" doesn't work (though I still wonder what took him so long, given that he saw Republicans turn the "sure bet" John Kerry into a war wimp while the guy who stayed home and snorted coke off the asses of hookers was regarded as a war hero because they'd seen him on TV in a flight suit with socks stuffed into the crotch).

But Obama's faltering in the polls isn't all his fault, because John McCain has a willing and eager accomplice in the mainstream media, whose talking heads and byliners are still covering him as if he were still the carefully constructed "maverick" of 2000 and earlier. I can't even watch "Morning Joe" for two minutes anymore because of the shamelessness of Joe Scarborough's mad mancrush on McCain. And that's on MSNBC, which is one of the LESS egregious offenders.

Multiply Joe Scarborough by all three of the major networks where America still gets most of its news, throw in CNN and Faux Noise, and major newspapers still afraid to pick on the guy who spent five years in a Hanoi prison (in case you didn't know, John McCain was a POW. Did I mention he was a POW? I'll bet you didn't know he was a POW. You know, I heard he was a POW. Gee, I forgot to tell you; he was a POW....), and you have a complete and impenetrable echo chamber in the tank for John McCain.

Robert Parry, Consortium News:

On Monday, Obama gave a detail-rich speech on how he would address the energy crisis, which is a major point of concern among Americans. From ideas for energy innovation to retrofitting the U.S. auto industry to conservation steps to limited new offshore drilling, Obama did what he is often accused of not doing, fleshing out his soaring rhetoric.

McCain responded with a harsh critique of Obama's calls for more conservation, claiming that Obama wants to solve the energy crisis by having people inflate their tires. McCain's campaign even passed out a tire gauge marked as Obama's energy plan.

For his part, McCain made clear he wanted to drill for more oil wherever it could be found and to build many more nuclear power plants.

These competing plans offered a chance for the evening news to address an issue of substance that is high on the voters' agenda. Instead, NBC News anchor Brian Williams devoted 30 seconds to the dueling energy speeches, without any details and with the witty opening line that Obama was "refining" his energy plan.

So, instead of dealing with a serious issue in a serious way, NBC News ignored the substance and went for a clever slight against Obama, hitting his political maneuvering in his softened opposition to more offshore drilling.

Williams's quip fit with one of the press corps' favorite campaign narratives, Obama's flip-flopping. But the coverage ignored far more important elements of the story, such as the feasibility of Obama's vow that "we must end the age of oil in our time" or the wisdom of McCain's emphasis on drilling -- and nuking -- the nation out of its energy mess.

And, as for flip-flops, McCain's dramatic repositioning of himself as an anti-environmentalist -- after years of being one of the green movement's favorite Republicans -- represents a far more significant change than Obama's modest waffling on offshore oil.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation's premier environmental organizations, has repudiated McCain and now is running ads attacking his energy plan. But McCain's flip-flops -- even complete reversals -- remain an underplayed part of the campaign story. They just don't fit the narrative of maverick John McCain on the "Straight Talk Express."

And that's just one example. The McCain campaign must be grinning from ear to ear at all the free air time their ads are getting on television news and opinion shows, despite the fact that if we had a press that wasn't so in thrall to McCain, the fact that he has his own little Norman Hsu problem (with a nice little twist only a Republican could have), except this one bundles contributions from the very same kind of Middle Eastern people that McCain's constituency wants to bomb back to the stone age.

If you want to know why women all over Daily Kos are proposing marriage to Keith Olbermann, a guy's guy with a girlfriend half his age and a history in that most assholish of media, sports broadcasting, it's because he's the only talking head on television with his own show who isn't still blinded by a man in a 40-year-old uniform and who doesn't care how good the barbecued ribs are.

It's not beyond comprehension that the press can be bought. It's just a shame that they can be bought so cheaply. Good barbecued ribs aren't that hard to make. I use a homemade dry rub, marinate the ribs in them all day, cook them VERY slowly, and put on the wet sauce in the last 10 minutes of grilling.

Buh...buh...buh...but he's a MAVERICK!!

He's also a psychotic nutcase:

On June 20, 1996, Senator John McCain allegedly assaulted a family member of a Vietnam War prisoner of war (POW) who was missing in action (MIA), as a group of about 15 family members of POW/MIAs watched in astonishment. Within about one month, five ethics complaints had been filed with the Senate Ethics Committee by five eyewitnesses. But the Senate Ethics Committee refused to investigate the matter.

According to eyewitness Carol Hrdlicka, wife of Vietnam War POW/MIA air force pilot Col. David Hrdlicka, the group had been waiting in the hall of the Russell Office Building in Washington, D.C. for McCain to come out of an office in order to hand deliver letters asking him to forego an amendment to the Missing Service Personnel Act (MSPA) of 2005. The MSPA had been signed into law in February 1996 as part of the Defense Authorization Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-106). This law, which updated a 1942 law, had been a major victory for the families of POW/MIAs who worked tirelessly to get it through Congress.

The MSPA required the Pentagon to beef up its resources to find and rescue missing service personnel in a timely manner. For instance, it required the filing of reports on missing persons within 48 hours. Among other substantive provisions, it also criminalized withholding information from the families of POWs by broadly stipulating that "any person who knowingly and willfully withholds from the personnel file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." McCain's amendment eviscerated these new changes. For instance, it increased the reporting time to 10 days, and it deleted entirely the stated provision penalizing the withholding of information.

These family members of POW/MIAs had come to speak with McCain to try to convince him to leave the law alone. Mrs. Hrdlicka gives the following description of what happened:

When he [McCain] realized who we were, his face turned red and he became enraged. He would not accept the letters we had brought, he burst through our group assaulting the niece of Jane Duke Gaylor, mother of a MIA. I followed Senator McCain down the hall asking that he leave the legislation alone and all the while he is denying that he knew anything about the Missing Personnel Act. ...As we reached the elevator he said to me that I didn't know what he had been through ... I then stated I understood what he had been through and David Hrdlicka was still going through it. I had the capture picture of my husband and tried to show the picture to him but he would not look at it. ...The elevator arrived and Senator McCain quickly jumped in -- that ended our conversation. After this incident we went to the Capitol Police and filed a report. We also sent complaints to the ethics committee on the Senator's behavior.

"He went from a smiling, congenial, happy face to a beet red, totally enraged face in an instant," she said. "I have never seen a senator act in this way. We were all dumbfounded how this happened. He threw his arm up, and she goes flying and Jane [who was in a wheelchair] gets pushed aside as he brushes by her. All I see is people flying and I'm behind him [McCain]... This was assault."

This is the man the media wants to see in the White House. This is the one they're calling an "independent" and a "maverick." The press has been bought off by some kind words and barbecued ribs, and in return they're going to do whatever is necessary to put an even more dangerous man than George W. Bush into the White House.

Sleep well, everyone.

The gargoyle behind the hero

I'm sure that when Regnery publishes its hit job on Barack Obama this summer, every smear, every lie, will be covered exhaustively by the mainstream media as "an alternative view". Meanwhile, the media's love affair with All Things McCain continues -- at least here in the U.S. Here, as if to squelch any notion that that uppity Michelle Obama is "the new Jackie", Newsweek puts Cindy McCain, airbrushed so that she almost looks like the 25-year-old her husband no doubt wishes she still was, in a Jackie-esque pink suit on its cover and inside pens a story of a brave, noble woman who's had a Really Tough Life™. In the press' world, Cindy McCain is someone who's been like a single mother, with her husband off in Washington. The Washington wives were mean to her, treating her like a trophy wife. I'm not sure why this would be seen as inaccurate, given that McCain made a beeline for the 25-year-old beer heiress while he was still married to his first wife (whom he had already in his mind dumped because she'd had the temerity to age five years, get into a disfiguring car accident, and gain weight as a result). The stealing drugs from her own charity is barely touched, and the involvement with a married man is equally brushed aside, under the IOKIYAR rule.

But it's Cindy McCain's likening of herself to a single mother that got my goat. I keep thinking of the 21-year-old from Bergen County with a new baby who's being shipped off to Iraq. Her life can't be all that easy here, and now she's being sent to a combat zone because she joined the National Guard to try to go to college. NO ONE joins the Guard thinking s/he's going to see combat in a war zone, because historically that isn't what the National Guard does -- unless the President wants to fight a war and refuses to take the political heat of a draft. THAT is a single mother; not a beer heiress worth $100 million who could hire all the help she wanted, who doesn't have to lie awake at night wondering how she'll have enough money to feed the kids for the rest of the month and whose husband "borrowed" $169,000 from her trust fund to run for Congress.

It's even more difficult to feel sorry for a woman with her own charitable foundation who runs the family beer distributorship whose husband calls her a "trollop" and a "cunt" in public, because she, unlike many women married to shitty men, has the resources to leave if she wants to. So don't play me any Songs of Sorrow for Cindy McCain.

But why shouldn't the press build an elaborate mythology around this woman -- another deer-in-the-headlights zombie who'll be seen and not heard any more than absolutely necessary (as opposed to that awful Obama woman™, who dares to think she's entitled to have an opinion of her own). They've already built one around her husband. The War Hero. The Maverick. The Man Who Marches to His Own Drummer. And at one time, all of those might have been true, but they aren't any longer. The problem is that if you only get your news from the likes of Newsweek, Time, newspapers, and cable and network news, you'd never know.

Cliff Schecter has tried to get the other side of John McCain out there in his new book, but you'll notice that Schecter hasn't exactly been invited onto the Today show and Hardball and The Situation Room (though you can bet that the author of the Obama smear book will be). On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Paul Harris in the Guardian writes for a population that can't vote in this election:

Welcome to the John McCain show 2008. It's powerful stuff, portraying McCain as the decent patriot of the middle ground and a steady hand for difficult times. For a lot of Americans - including many Democrats - it is a beguiling vision. They see a war hero whose courage was forged in a North Vietnamese POW camp. They see a maverick who spoke against the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They see a reformer who acts against lobbyists and political favours. They see a politician who has spent a lifetime serving his country and won a place in the hearts of the nation.

Now McCain is also trying to win the White House. He has taken his campaign to places far from the projected Republican road map to victory. He has spoken in the 'black belt' of rural Alabama. He has toured Appalachian coal country to talk about poverty. He has gone to the hippy enclave of Oregon to lecture on global warming. In short, he is a Republican that even liberals can love. And many do. McCain's appeal to America's vital middle ground could easily propel him to the Oval Office.

But there is another, very different side to John McCain. Away from the headlines and the stirring speeches, a less familiar figure lurks. It is a McCain who plans to fight on in Iraq for years to come and who might launch military action against Iran. This is the McCain whose campaign and career has been riddled with lobbyists and special interests. It is a McCain who has sided with religious and political extremists who believe Islam is evil and gays are immoral. It is a McCain who wants to appoint extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court and see abortion banned. This McCain has a notoriously volatile temper that has scared some senior members of his own party. If McCain becomes the most powerful man in the world it would be wise to know what lies behind his public mask, to look at the dark side of John McCain.

[snip]

McCain's campaign bus - dubbed the Straight Talk Express, just as it was in 2000 - is filled with journalists who travel at the back with McCain, relaxing on a U-shaped couch. McCain recently hosted a barbecue for journalists at his Arizona ranch. As TV anchors and newspaper reporters sipped beer and cocktails under a desert sun, McCain stood at the grill and literally served up their daily nourishment. He is someone you could have a beer with, in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who keeps his press entourage firmly at arm's length. Yet McCain's riskier strategy has worked like a dream. Reporters often overlook McCain's errors and flaps - especially in national security - clinging instead to the narrative of an unconventional patriot. 'The media love him, especially his war record. He is the GI Joe doll they played with as kids,' says Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside.

There is also a little-reported back-up plan for reporters who do not toe the line: sheer aggression. A recent Washington Post piece on a land deal by one of McCain's allies prompted a brutal response from the McCain campaign. Without disproving facts, they labelled the story 'shameful' and a 'smear job'. When Newsweek ran a story on the Obama camp's perception of McCain's weak spots, McCain's team struck again. This time the story was 'offensive' and 'scurrilous'. The campaign is willing to strike out abroad, recently persuading one European newspaper editor to scrap a review of Schecter's book. For the fact is, McCain's benevolent public image is no accident. It has been carefully crafted and is forcefully policed. 'This has gone on for years. This is an image he has worked very hard to maintain,' says Professor Seth Masket of the University of Denver.

(More here.)

And of course that's exactly what it is -- an image. Even Jack Kemp has said that McCain is too unstable to be president. You would think that having had one gargoyle in the office disguised by an affable exterior would have taught us. But with McCain running within six points in some recent polls, despite his gaffes, his many lobbyists, his willingness to sacrifice however many young Americans it takes in order for him to resolve HIS issues with his father, and his chief adviser opining that another terrorist attack on the U.S. would be great for his campaign (nothing like the corpses of a few thousand Americans to create political benefit, eh, Mr. Black?); it's all too clear that the image is all most Americans see. And that's exactly how the press wants it. Because they sure do love them barbecue ribs.

Did he really just say that?

On the Today show, Matt Lauer just referred to those who turned out for Tim Russert's funeral yesterday as "the power elite."

So if this group of politicians and so-called journalists constitute "the power elite", will they PLEASE stop slurring Barack Obama as "an elitist"? Unless, of course, they mean it as "that uppity Negro who wants admission to our club.

Come to think of it, that's probably waht they DO mean.

Sunday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said (special McCain Media Mancrush Edition)

And they used to say that WOMEN loved a man in uniform...

The mainstream media's love for All Things Male and Military is nothing new. We all remember the likes of Chris Matthews and G. Gordon practically going into spontaneous orgasms at the mere sight of the coward George W. Bush with socks stuffed into the crotch of his flightsuit in 2002. More recently Tweety has talked of the "thrill going up his leg" at Barack Obama.

But no one gives the Manly Men of Media more of a boner than that soldier di tutti soldiers, John McCain.

And no one is going to call them on it like my compatriots in Blogtopia (™ Skippy).

And so today's honoree (and newest blogrollee) is Blue Girl from Blue Girl, Red State, said red state being, appropriately, Missouri -- for her ever-vigilant eye on, and debunking of, the heartflutters of the media whores who love John McCain.

(Did I just say whores? Does that mean Air America won't take my calls?)

The perfect Valentine's Day gift for your wingnut friends

(h/t)